Christie’s Shuts Digital Art Arm as NFT Market Remains Frozen Solid

Another blue-chip player pulls back from digital collectibles—proof even auction giants can't thaw a frozen market.

Market Reality Check

Christie’s just axed its digital art department. No surprise there. The NFT winter dragged on so long it turned into an ice age. Buyers vanished. Prices cratered. Even the big names are cutting losses.

Finance folks saw it coming—another 'disruptive' asset class that dazzled before delivering a classic boom-bust performance. Some things never change.

So what’s next? Innovation doesn’t stop, but hype does. The space rebuilds—quieter, smarter, and a lot less speculative.

Giles had been a prominent face of Christie’s digital push, notably at the Art+Tech Summit in Hong Kong last year, which ran alongside Hong Kong Fintech Week.

There she argued that Christie’s brought the same valuation discipline to NFTs as it did to paintings or sculptures, but with one critical difference.

"What’s unique with digital art is the community engagement aspect, which absolutely comes into play in a way it never has with traditional art,” she said at the time.

Others at the summit acknowledged that the category was still far from mature.

“I do not think at this very moment we have a very standardized understanding of [digital art’s] value,” said Angelle Siyang-Le, director of Art Basel Hong Kong last year. “That’s why you do see a lot of it all of a sudden coming out, and then obviously created that excitement. That excitement created that awareness. And now from here to the next phase … how do we align such standards of values?”

A year later, the numbers show how fragile that foundation was.

NFT trading volume fell 45% last quarter to $867 million, even as sales counts ROSE 78% to 12.5 million, according to DappRadar.

Floor prices for blue chip NFT collections have slipped well below their peak levels: CryptoPunks trade around 46.6 ETH ($210,000), Bored Apes hover at 9.1 ETH ($41,000), and Moonbirds sit at 2.8 ETH ($12,600). By contrast, ethereum itself has rallied 76% in the past three months to $4,509, outpacing the NFT market.

On X, some observers argued that Christie’s decision reflects simple economics rather than capitulation, noting that NFTs are increasingly being absorbed into mainstream contemporary sales rather than treated as a separate “collectible” category.

This retreat by Christie’s hints that without firmer valuations and clearer standards, NFTs risk remaining an add-on to contemporary art rather than sustaining a market of their own.